Wed 23 Oct 2013
A TV Series Review by Michael Shonk: FALLEN ANGELS (1993, 1995).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[16] Comments
FALLEN ANGELS. Showtime, 1993 & 1995. Showtime Presentation / Mirage Enterprises in association with Propaganda Films. Series created by William Horberg. Fallen Angels themes written by Elmer Bernstein and Peter Bernstein. Music by Peter Bernstein.
Season One: 1993 – 6 episodes. Executive Producer: Sydney Pollack. Produced by William Horberg, Lindsay Doran and Steve Golin. Season Two: 1995 – 9 episodes. Executive Producers: Sydney Pollack and Lindsay Doran. Supervising Producer: Steve Golin. Producers: Stuart Cornfeld and William Horberg.
Pure noir and television have never really found the perfect match, unlike the hardboiled detective and TV. Perhaps the closest TV series to achieve pure noir was Showtime’s Fallen Angels.
Set in the film noir world of Los Angeles, 1940s, the series production values and music were its best assets. The original music by Elmer Bernstein and his son Peter and performed by Teddy Edwards mixed well with the heavy use of music from the time period featuring such legendary performers as Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker.
The series opened with a mood setting prologue directed by Phil Joanou. Season One featured the sultry talents of Lynette Walden as the host “Fay Friendly.†After a year without any original episodes the series returned with “Fay Friendly†replaced by the voice-over narration of Miguel Ferrer. Both worked well.
Fallen Angels most interesting choice was the decision to use source material from some of the best writers of noir and hardboiled fiction, writers such as David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Evan Hunter, Walter Mosley, James Ellroy and Mickey Spillane. Of course Hammett and Chandler were included.
I hope to someday see the episode “Flypaper†with Donald Westlake’s adaption of the Dashiell Hammett Continental Op story, even if the casting of Christopher Lloyd as the Continental Op was completely wrong (something common to every adaption of the Op).
Fallen Angels featured many talented directors including Steven Soderbergh, John Dahl, Jim McBride, Agnieszka Holland and Alfonso Cuaron (whose current film Gravity is the hit of this fall movie season). The series also let a few stars such as Tom Cruise, Kiefer Sutherland and Tom Hanks take a turn behind the camera.
The cast for the anthology series was a varied and talented group including Tom Hanks, Laura San Giacomo, Darren McGavin, Danny Glover, Nancy Travis, James Woods, Dana Delany, Gary Oldman, Marg Helgenberger, William Peterson and Gary Busey.
YouTube currently has some episodes available to view. Some are missing the prologue or have foreign language subtitles but all remain worth watching.
“Murder, Obliquely†(1993)
Cast: Laura Dern, Alan Rickman, and Diane Lane. Based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich. Teleplay by Amanda Silver. Director of Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron. *** Laura Dern is Annie, a plain dull woman no man has ever dated twice. Then one night she falls for bad boy Dwight (Alan Rickman) who is having problems with the cheating love of his life, Bernette (Diane Lane).
This episode fails in many ways, first with the casting of the beautiful and talented Laura Dern as Annie. Yes, make-up and hair helped plain her down, but nothing could hide that she possesses a body no heterosexual male would reject. Dern and the rest of the talented cast were wasted on the under developed characters of the flawed script.
Writer Amanda Silver was loyal to the short story’s words but not the subtext. Time limits forced Silver to condense the short story too much, removing the wit and depth of the characters for the sake of highlighting the predictable action.
For example, Woolrich had taken the cliché bad girl and gave her an insecure side that made Bernette more sympathetic to the reader and made Dwight more unlikeable. The script missed those moments, disabling the talented Diane Lane’s performance, and making Dwight more a victim than a villain.
The story was about a lonely spinster in waiting and her falling for the “final†love of her life. The TV version ends differently from the short story with the TV version more open ended. This sacrificed Woolrich’s ending that made the reader ache from the sad loneliness of Annie’s future, making me wonder if anyone with the TV show understood Woolrich’s point.
Director Alfonso Cuaron heavy use of close ups, the most emotional of all camera angles, gave the story an emotional kick it needed and his use of the master shot added to the noir mood.
Other episodes on YouTube are much the same, good but lacking in depth.
“Professional Man†(1995)
Cast: Brendan Fraser, Bruce Ramsay and Peter Coyote. Based on a short story by David Goodis. Teleplay by Howard A. Rodman. Director of Photography: Robert Stevens. Directed by Stephen Soderbergh. *** Elevator boy finds himself in a deadly love triangle at his other job.
“The Quiet Room†(1993)
Cast: Joe Mantegna, Bonnie Bedelia and Peter Gallagher. Based on a short story by Jonathan Craig. Teleplay by Howard A. Rodman. Director of Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. *** Two crooked cops/lovers shakedown of prostitutes and their Johns goes tragically wrong.
Anthologies are expensive to produce with all the sets, settings, and cast changing with every episode, high costs most likely played a role in the series end. But pure noir demands the stand-alone story. It tells a personal journey of a doomed person’s fall from respectability, something impossible for a character to do on a weekly basis.
Pure noir is not dependent on mystery unless it is the mystery of what can move us to willingly destroy ourselves. Noir is the meanness of such human emotions as love, anger and greed. To enjoy noir one must understand the characters. Not only understand why they make the choices they make but how they ended up facing those choices. Short stories such as Woolrich’s “Murder, Obliquely†did this, but the series adaptations failed to bring that vital element to the small screen.
Reducing complex character driven stories of noir to thirty-minutes was the fatal flaw of Fallen Angels. Any character driven television drama needs at least sixty-minutes, preferably even longer to properly tell the story and portray the subtext of words not spoken.
There was a book released, Six Noir Tales Told for Television (Grove Press 1993) featuring Fallen Angels first season scripts and the original short stories. While currently there is no DVD or official streaming/downloading available of the series there were two pre-recorded videotapes released with each featuring three episodes.
October 23rd, 2013 at 10:37 pm
Those wondering if the writer Howard A. Rodman was the same who created HARRY O, it was not. Howard A. was his son.
October 24th, 2013 at 2:47 am
As far as I remember I have only seen three episodes of this series on German TV, but I enjoyed them very much. It is interesting that Michael Shonk makes a difference between noir and hard-boiled which I think is correct.
October 24th, 2013 at 12:39 pm
Josef, this post was done before David and I discussed in recent comments what are the rules of mysteries. To me “mystery” is a huge genre that contains several sub-genres. It is the sub-genres where the rules come in.
Today’s definition of noir centers around lighting. Yet Woolrich’s “Murder, Obliquely” has no dark streets, it barely has a mystery. It reaches instead into the darkness of the soul. After reading the short story and watching the adaption it reinforced my belief in what is noir and what is hardboiled detective.
I know you are not in America, are you able to watch the episodes from YouTube? Did you like them as much as before?
Oh, anyone who has read David Goodis’ “Professional Man” why was the character an Elevator Boy?
October 24th, 2013 at 3:34 pm
I saw most of the episodes of this series, perhaps all of them. Christopher Lloyd made a good OP surprisingly, and while physically wrong, perhaps the most like the character in the books and stories I’ve seen.
For me the best episodes were a well done adaptation of a Mickey Spillane story (“Tomorrow I Die”)replete with surprise ending, and the adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “I’ll Be Waiting,” with Bruno Kirby as the hotel detective.
I was very disappointed in the adaptation of “Red Wind” with Danny Glover. Though it was very faithful to the story the gimmick of having Marlowe (it was originally a Johnny Dalmas story)played by a black actor in the forties milieu was blunted by the fact there was little or no difference between the story as designed for the white Marlowe.
Beyond the idea of Glover playing Marlowe (not a bad one) any originality was mitigated by ignoring any real sense of the social and legal problems a black Marlowe would encounter in forties LA or Baytown.
Had they updated the setting to a contemporary one I would have had no problem, but as it is Glover’s Marlowe faced no more trouble with the police or society in general than the white Marlowe, turning the story virtually into an alternate world fantasy. A uchronian Marlowe might be interesting, but this one was also singularly dull in execution and remarkably bland on the actors part. It is nowhere near as interesting as it sounds.
Michael
I agree on noir. It is more a milieu than a hard set of rules — sort of a know it when you see it kind of thing.
I’m not that strict about what is a mystery. I just don’t see the point of writing a bad one just because you want to do something else with it. Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers is both a good mystery and a literary tour de force as are many of Durrenmatt’s works. Even Picasso learned how to paint classically before he created cubism. Any professional will tell you that you must learn the rules before you can break them.
October 24th, 2013 at 11:40 pm
David
I envy you for having seen most if not all of episodes of this series. I think I have one of the video cassettes that Michael mentions, but like most of my video cassettes, it is now buried away where no one could find it, not even a Sherlock Holmes. Alas, I did not watch it before DVDs took over, and I was absolutely certain the whole series would come out that way.
Wrong.
I sure do not understand the movie and TV business, and while I am sure that Michael can take me by the hand and explain, I would have thought that FALLEN ANGELS would be a natural for DVD. Not so.
October 25th, 2013 at 12:36 am
#5. Steve, its a Showtime production which means CBS Films owns it. My guess is the problem is the rights to the soundtrack and maybe the original stories. Music is a problem with DVD because each piece, original and songs from the era must each be dealt with and there are reportedly problems dealing with the musicians union.
October 25th, 2013 at 9:07 am
Michael, I am able to watch the episodes from YouTube but would prefer DVD.
October 25th, 2013 at 9:40 am
7. Josef, thanks. I agree DVDs are better than YouTube. DVDs would not be edited or have odd subtitles. I would like to see it at Netflix or iTunes.
I have been surprised by the lack of opinions about the three episodes posted. I have read the Woolrich short story which is why I examined “Murder, Obliquely” in more depth than the other two.
How well were the David Goodis and Jonathan Craig short stories adapted? What was the reason for Goodis main character in “Professional Man” to be an Elevator Boy?
October 25th, 2013 at 5:07 pm
Another problem with Fallen Angels may be its multiple creators, Walter Hill and others, but then again, it’s usually the music rights.
October 25th, 2013 at 10:13 pm
I recently picked up an oversize pb titled “Fallen Angels” with an intro by James Ellroy which has the original stories of the first six shows as well as the teleplays, cast and crew, and a few B/W photos as well. A very nice item. In the intro, Ellroy says we owe it all to Hammett, who started the whole Shebang with ” Red Harvest”
Back in ’29! Being the Hammett fanatic that I am, I can’t disagree with him.
I don’ t think there was another book put out for the second season, or if there is, I can’t find it on Bookfinder. Like Steve, I also have the VCR versions of both years somewhere, but would love to own DVD versions if available.
October 25th, 2013 at 11:57 pm
I don’t buy many books any more, not nearly as many as I used to, but I have that paperback winging its way to me right now. Didn’t know about it before, and I couldn’t resist it.
October 26th, 2013 at 12:59 am
10. Paul, you are correct there is no book for the second season. I also believe the VT are from season one. It seemed to have been promoted for its first season. Then the show stopped making new episodes for a year and returned in 1995. I could find no explanation for the season off or why Showtime decided to bring it back.
October 26th, 2013 at 8:40 am
#11. Steve, make sure to read the Ellroy intro. Written in typical Ellroy fashion, causing a newcomer to utter “what the Hell?” , but classic, none-the-less. I’ve enjoyed Ellroy since Walker turned him on to both of us way back from his first pbo “Brown’s Requiem” in the early 80’s.
#12. Michael, I also found it odd for the show to skip a year. Year two had nine shows compared to only six from the first. Possibly a production glitch
prevented a total of twelve being shot, for years two and three?
One other thing. The Chandler story they used is from a slick mag, not a pulp. “I’ll Be Waiting” is from the Saturday Evening Post.
October 26th, 2013 at 8:14 pm
Paul
I wrote a review of Brown’s Requiem back in 1982 when it first came out. I’ll post it here soon.
November 1st, 2013 at 8:40 am
I wish the Paley Center had more episodes of Fallen Angels, but in fact we have only three: Murder Obliquely, Dead End for Delia, and The Quiet Room. These are viewable for the public at the PC in NY or LA.
This whole question of noir: I think it’s an impossible term to accurately define. Even the French critics who first used the term to define the Hollywood films of the early forties couldn’t agree on it. People like Paul Schrader and Raymond Durgnat who continued trying to define it in the sixties and seventies made all sorts of claims about it that are not substantiable if you really sort through the canon.
The distinction I make is that Fallen Angels was trying to capture the essence of classic noir, even setting its stories in that time period. As you know, Michael, there have been other shows that tried to do this, without any success at all: City of Angels, Bannon, Private Eye all come to mind.
But my argument would be that you don’t have to be capturing classic noir to actually be noir, but rather you just have to limn a credibly dark and dangerous world characterized by anxiety, alienation, despair, etc. If you accept this definition you could argue that many shows — Breaking Bad, The Fugitive, Twin Peaks among them — are examples where TV got noir right.
November 1st, 2013 at 2:42 pm
#15. David, I am an English language anarchist. The meaning of words change with time and how it is used. Noir is certainly in the eyes of the beholder.
Does Chandler and Hammett belong in noir? Is “Murder, Obliquely” a mystery? Does noir have to have a mystery or crime?
I would not consider THE FUGITIVE noir because of the ending (he survived). I would call TWIN PEAKS surreal before I would use noir to describe it. BREAKING BAD belongs in noir as it is the story of a doomed character who destroys himself due to his emotions (this time greed rather than lust).